K. Kautsky. "Patriotism, War, and Social-Democracy" (*Die Neue Zeit*, XXIII, 2; 1905). Military strike = "heroic stupidity" (370), as are the "attempts" of bourgeois pacifists to eliminate wars through arbitration courts. Both stupidities "flow from the error that war is regarded as an isolated fact."
* See the present volume, pp. 604-605. Ed.
** Extracts from Engels's correspondence with Sorge were written on pages 36 and 37 of the notebook (see the present volume, p. 600). Ed.
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NOTEBOOK "ο" ("OMICRON")
But war threatens catastrophe: "However, defeat in a reckless war is such a catastrophe as leads to the deepest collapse" (371).
The proletariat "is hardly anywhere yet sufficiently strong" to make war impossible before it breaks out by means of revolution (and military strike is revolution). "But it is already strong enough in all capitalist states that any war connected with great losses and producing no result must become the starting point for a revolution that will establish a proletarian regime" (371).